I sort by most amount of stars quite frequently when I am learning a new language and want to know what the most popular package is for something. What do you think would be a better metric for a use case like that?
Don't count any of my stars then, I thought it was a bookmark feature. Every repo I've starred is only starred to find later, not an endorsement from me.
That's partly what I assume people star repos for, it really doesn't defeat my use case. It's a metric that indicates interest and popularity more so than approval or endorsements.
I think it's a decent metric. I agree with the other comment that actual imports is probably a better metric, but that's not always as trivial to find.
That said, the package repositories for many popular languages list stats of either declared dependencies or package downloads, which helps.
Ah yes. I forgot I actually use this feature in some of my projects. GitHub isn't always able to update this automatically but you can programmatically report dependencies.
Right. I believe they rely on things like requirements.txt, Cargo.toml, etc. And of course not all languages are supported. So if you use an unsupported language or package manager, you're out of luck.
This might work but biases against languages whose package managers are not used in the rank. As well as code that is used alot but not referenced via code directly e.g. drop in dlls.
